GAIUTRA BAHADUR

They are running and rejected.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

BAGHDAD – Alyaa said she was the first woman in her neighborhood to sign up to work with the U.S. government after Saddam Hussein fell.
She used to stand shoulder to shoulder with an American soldier in front of the U.S. military’s Camp Scania in the Rashid section of Baghdad. A translator, Alyaa, 24, talked to Iraqis who lined up at the entrance seeking compensation for dead relatives and destroyed homes.

Now, because of that work, her life is in danger and in limbo.

Alyaa, who asked that her last name be withheld out of fear for her safety, fled to Jordan with her cousin Shaimaa after insurgents killed an uncle and kidnapped Shaimaa and another cousin. Alyaa had hoped to find a haven in the United States but discovered that the State Department was not resettling refugees from Iraq.

She has lost her faith in the country she once loved.

“We gave them our friendship,” jeans-clad, cigarette-smoking Alyaa said during a recent interview at an Amman restaurant. “We gave them our hard work. And they don’t even help us to have a new life.”

Would it be so hard, she asked, “for America to give a visa to Iraqis to have a new life that they took from them?”

Refugee aid workers and U.S. and U.N. officials said the United States had turned away Iraqi refugees because it was trying instead to create a democratic society from which no one had to flee and was sacrificing American lives in the process. To succeed, it needs the talents of the very people who want to leave.

“The whole purpose of being here is to create an environment of stability and security so that’s not an issue,” said Joanne Cummings, refugee coordinator at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Cummings said the embassy valued people who had put themselves at risk and kept a close watch on them.

More than 700,000 Iraqi refugees live in Jordan and Syria; 15,000 of them arrived in Amman after the American invasion two years ago, according to the U.N. refugee office. They include religious minorities, doctors, and other professionals who fear being kidnapped for ransom, and a growing number of Iraqis who were threatened because of their work with the U.S. government and its contractors.

Nongovernmental organizations first became aware of the problem as U.S. soldiers approached them for help in getting their translators out of the country, only to be told it was impossible.

In Alyaa and Shaimaa’s case, the soldier was Army Capt. Patrick J. Murphy of the 82d Airborne Division, their supervisor and an Iraq war veteran who is a Philadelphia lawyer.

“They fought just as bravely as we did over there, and I think we owe it to them as a grateful nation to do everything we can to help them become Americans,” Murphy said.

So many former employees have sought protection in other countries that the U.N. refugee office recently rewrote its guidelines for Iraq to include those ties as reasonable grounds for fear of persecution, said Marie Helene Verney, a spokeswoman for the agency in Geneva, Switzerland.

“Such people should be of special humanitarian concern to the U.S.,” Bill Frelick, director of refugee programs for the human-rights group Amnesty International, wrote in a letter to U.S. officials in February.

“In principle, there is no blunt refusal,” said Verney, the U.N. spokeswoman. “The few cases in the pipeline are taking a long time.”

The threats against Alyaa and her family came in June in sealed envelopes delivered to their homes in Dora, a Baghdad neighborhood rife with insurgents. There were six letters, one for each member of the family who was working for the United States.

“You help the people you’re supposed to fight,” Alyaa said they read. “You deserve death.”

The letters, signed by a group calling itself the Jihad Units, instructed the family to post signs at the local mosque within three days saying they had quit their jobs – or face beheading. But before the deadline passed, her uncle, a construction contractor for the United States, was ambushed on his way to work and shot in the heart.

The slaying sent the family scattering. Alyaa went into hiding, hopscotching from house to house and finally fleeing north. While she was away, a gang of men kidnapped two female cousins, the ones whose father had just been killed.

They held one of them – Shaimaa, 26, who also had worked at Camp Scania – for six weeks in a one-room mud house near Ramadi that served as a weapons storehouse. The other cousin was released after a week with a ransom demand.

Shaimaa said the men had taunted her with specific details about the young women’s friendships with soldiers at the base. They disparaged Alyaa, asking Shaimaa whether Alyaa had made love to a captain when she worked behind closed doors with him. And they killed Shaimaa’s fiancee while they held her captive.

The family sold their properties to pay $60,000 for Shaimaa’s release. She emerged “almost crazy,” Alyaa said. For a long time after her release, Shaimaa would not sit in the same room with her brother or watch television because her abductors believed it was un-Islamic to do so.

She still has dark bruises on her right forearm and incisions in the nails of both middle fingers where the insurgents attached cables to administer electric shocks. And she still awakes crying from nightmares.

The cousins flew to Amman in December. They joined a community of Iraqi expatriates that has swollen to such a degree that one commercial road in the Jordanian capital has been nicknamed Tigris and Euphrates Street for the two rivers that flow through Iraq to the Persian Gulf.

The influx has inflated real estate prices and tightened the job market, leading the Jordanian government to crack down. Iraqis can’t work or study there. And they can’t live there continuously for more than three months unless they have hefty deposits in Jordanian banks, because every day they stay beyond that means a fine.

Alyaa and Shaimaa registered as refugees with the U.N. office in Amman but returned to Baghdad in frustration in early April as their three months came to a close. “I cannot stay in Baghdad,” Alyaa said. “I cannot go to another country. I cannot stay in Jordan.”

Even advocates who are urging the United States to offer sanctuary to former workers recognize the challenges that a formal refugee program would pose.

“It’s a really tough thing,” said Amnesty International’s Frelick. “If you let all the interpreters leave the country, then what are you going to do? . . . If we start evacuating Iraqis because it’s too unsafe for them there, is that going to create a backlash in the U.S at a time when we’re sending U.S. soldiers to Iraq and they’re dying?”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Self-sufficiency is a stance as deeply rooted in India as its fight to cast off its colonizers. Mahatma Gandhi wore only khadi, or homespun cloth. The gesture, tied to a boycott of textiles made in Britain, signified that the country did not want to – nor did it have to – rely on foreign masters. Independent India banned Coca-Cola for more than a decade, drinking the homegrown Thums Up, instead.

So Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s declaration after the December tsunami that India could handle its immediate disaster-relief efforts on its own was not out of character.

Though this inward instinct has begun to slacken in the last decade, the idea that “we are capable of handling our own affairs is still there, and India wants to demonstrate that it is indeed capable,” said Gautam Adhikari, a former executive editor of one of India’s most widely circulated English dailies, the Times of India, and now a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

The rejection of help from other governments points to India’s bid to be the predominant power in the region and a player on the world stage. And, unlike other countries in the tsunami disaster zone, India has resources to marshal for its own relief efforts.

What’s more, it is eager to show that it can help other affected countries. It is one of Sri Lanka’s largest relief funders and has sent troops to the island nation to help distribute aid. India, with an economic growth rate second only to China’s, also finds itself in the company of the industrialized First World as the only developing nation on the committee coordinating disaster relief in the region. (The others are the United States, Japan and Australia.)

“That’s an important thing for India… to be involved as sort of an equal partner in that,” said writer Mira Kamdar, an expert on U.S.-India relations and a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York. “They have real capabilities there. It’s not like they [First World nations] are doing some sort of favor by letting them into this club.”

India’s position on aid from foreign governments “is a signal of its notion of itself as a player rather than a victim,” she said. “India has ambitions to play this kind of a role, and it is in fact starting to play this role. It’s not just a fantasy.”

Still, India’s response to the disaster will be a significant test for a country that wants a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and, more generally in world affairs, one at the grown-ups’ table.

The tsunami’s death toll in India was 10,000; many thousands more lost their livelihoods, and property damage was $1.5 billion. Though the government intends to handle immediate relief itself, it has tacitly acknowledged that it could use some help for the longer term.

On Tuesday, the government approached the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank for financial assistance for such projects as rebuilding roads and helping fishermen who lost boats to devise a way to make a living.

This can be viewed as a relatively minor call for outside assistance. India’s needs are small when set against the scale of loss in Indonesia and Sri Lanka and the strength of its liberalized and increasingly tech-driven economy. (India not only drinks Coca-Cola now, the government also welcomes the multinationals and the likes of Microsoft on its soil.)

Along with new levels of prosperity, India notably possesses a significant infrastructure for dealing with the aftermath of nature’s wrath. Calamities – drought, floods, earthquakes, tidal waves – come India’s way with a relentlessness that is almost rhythmic. “Every year, there is something or the other happening,” said Adhikari of the American Enterprise Institute. “So, there’s experience.”

The government runs institutes such as the Center for Disaster Management, which offers courses for civil servants of nearly every stripe, from police officers to forestry bureaucrats. The Famine Relief Handbook is a well-thumbed resource for Indian administrators. Every district collector studies it and knows it.

“They’ve been handling famines effectively since the 19th century,” said Stephen P. Cohen, a fellow at the Brookings Institute and author of a book about Indian disaster relief published in the 1970s.

Also, thousands of nongovernmental organizations are at work in India. Most are locally grown, though international agencies such as Oxfam also have branches there.

The opening of the Indian economy has enhanced the country’s ability to stand on its own. So has its export of a chief asset: its most skilled and well-educated people. Every year, millions in charitable donations flow homeward from Indians abroad. Their investments in the Indian economy, factoring in remittances, venture capital, and foreign-exchange deposits, are in the billions, according to investment firm Goldman Sachs.

India is also trying to tap into the wealth of its diaspora, the second-largest worldwide, at 20 million people. The country, eloquently, has a Ministry for Overseas Indian Affairs.

Fortuitously, earlier this month Bombay hosted the third annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, or Festival of Indians Abroad, a four-day gathering of 1,400 prominent expatriates. The government honored 15 of them, including a quartet of Americans: filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, Silicon Valley telecommunications guru Sam Pitroda, economist Jagdish Bhagwati, and political scientist Sunil Khilnani. (Shyamalan, who lives in Gladwyne, did not attend.)

More than accolades was on the agenda. At the last minute, organizers added a special plenary session titled “Disaster Management Reconstruction and Rehabilitation: Role of Overseas Indians.” Many of those present pledged contributions to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund. And India’s President Abdul Kalam asked them to raise $100 million to set up and endow a foundation for earthquake research.

India’s ability to manage its post-tsunami recovery does not diminish one of the problems that has long plagued the country: sectarianism. Nongovernmental organization personnel working with the coastal communities in Tamil Nadu, the most severely hit state, have heard complaints about discrimination against lower-caste groups in the distribution of aid.

Walter Andersen, a South Asia scholar who was vacationing along the Sri Lankan coast when the tsunami flooded the first floor of his hotel, attributed the problem in part to local bureaucrats, who are “reluctant to go against local customs, which include caste distinctions.”

Andersen, an associate director of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, supports the premise that India will be able to recover from the tsunami largely on its own. “Whether or not there’s inefficiency or caste prejudices, I don’t think there’s a question of financial resources,” he said. “As far as I know, they don’t need the help.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

High Court reviews Mariel cases.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

The United States wants to deport them, and their homelands won’t take them back. Meanwhile, they wait in detention centers.

They are at least 1,700 stowaways, thwarted asylum seekers, and ex-convicts who have done their time for their crimes.

The vast majority have been locked up longer than a year, stuck in a legal crevice between countries where no one is certain whether the U.S. Constitution applies. The nation’s Supreme Court could soon decide that question.

The justices today will consider whether two Cubans who came to this country as part of the massive 1980 Mariel boat lift – and committed crimes here that led to orders for their deportation – can be held indefinitely. The pair and many hundreds of others in jails and detention facilities on U.S. soil were never formally admitted into the country. In the eyes of the law, they are not really here.

“On paper, we’re still on a boat,” said one Cuban at the York County Prison, an ex-convict who has been behind bars for two years waiting for Fidel Castro to reclaim him. “If they say I’m still on a boat, then put me on a boat, and I’ll find my way back to Cuba.”

In 2001, the Supreme Court decided the government could not hold foreigners indefinitely if it could not deport them. Usually, the impasse involves citizens of countries, such as Cuba and China, that do not have repatriation agreements with the United States. It is also difficult to deport people to places with redrawn or disputed borders, such as the former Soviet Union and the Palestinian territories.

The court set six months as the threshold for freeing detainees. The decision applies to those who stole past the borders or overstayed valid visas. But it is unclear whether it applies to those stopped at ports of entry or, like the Mariel refugees, were paroled but not technically accepted into the United States.

Hollywood this year offered its version of this bureaucratic limbo in The Terminal, with Tom Hanks as a citizen of a fictional Slavic nation that blips out of existence while he is en route to New York. He arrives as a man without a country, unable for nine months to go home or enter the America that lies beyond the doors of the airport.

In real life, such waits unfold against a backdrop of orange prison jumpsuits and Plexiglass dividers. According to data provided to The Inquirer by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, there were 1,776 people detained as of Sept. 8 who had been ordered deported six months before or earlier.

It costs U.S. taxpayers an average of $90 a day – or about $33,000 a year – to hold someone in immigration custody, the enforcement bureau said.

Two on the list have been held for 19 years. A total of 33 have waited in jail for more than 15 years to be deported. All are Cubans, who make up more than 40 percent of the list.
County jails and federal detention centers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey hold one in five detainees on the list. Twelve are at the Montgomery County Jail, and 76 – the most in any one facility in either state – are at the York County Prison.

Many of their fates could be affected by how the Supreme Court resolves a lower-court split in the cases of two ex-convicts who were part of the Mariel exodus, legal experts say.
One federal appeals court ruled that Daniel Benitez, an armed robber from Florida in immigration custody since 2001, could be held indefinitely. Another affirmed a lower court’s order two years ago to free Sergio Suarez Martinez, convicted on attempted sexual assault and other charges, from detention in Oregon.

Government lawyers argue that ordering their release would “provide an open channel for foreign governments to thrust their unwanted citizens and dangerous individuals into American society.”

The detainees and their advocates say they have merely been dumped into a legal no-man’s-land by geopolitical forces bigger than them. “I don’t think anybody sugarcoats the criminal records these folks have,” said Don Kerwin, head of the Washington-based Catholic Legal Immigration Network. “At some point, after you’ve served many years, there are obvious human-rights problems here.”

Teodulfo Carrero Rubi, 46, had just finished a two-year sentence in Havana for stealing a pair of pants when Castro opened the port of Mariel to anyone who wanted to leave. “Coming from jail, I knew it was going to be hard for me to live in my country,” Rubi said in an interview at the York County Prison. “Whatever happens, they put you back in jail. I was scared. . . . They pick you up and put you in jail for nothing.”

So he joined the swell of 125,000 Cubans who fled to the United States in 1980. Twenty percent, most held for political crimes or misdemeanors, had come from Castro’s jails. Private boats under the watch of the Coast Guard fetched them to U.S. shores.

President Jimmy Carter welcomed them with what he called “an open heart and open arms.” He used a tool deployed since the 1960s as an emergency floodgate for waves of refugees too large to handle otherwise: He “paroled” them into the United States. They were given work permits, tens of millions of dollars in public benefits, and the right to hold green cards. The Mariel Cubans were here to stay.

“I was thinking,” Rubi said, “maybe I can have a better life in another country.”

As it turned out, he had a life that unfolded mainly behind bars. He was busted twice for possessing cocaine. In 1986, he shot a man in the chest during a street fracas and, a year later, was convicted of first-degree manslaughter.

By that time, about 84,000 Mariel Cubans had become legal permanent residents, a fact used by government lawyers to show that the detainees had been given their chance.

“The United States . . . offered the aliens the opportunity to become lawful permanent residents,” they argue in the Benitez case. “Petitioner and the other aliens responded to those offers by committing crime after crime within this country.”

Criminal records barred some from becoming permanent residents. Rubi said he simply did not get around to it. The oversight would make all the difference when the state released him, in April 2003, from 16 years of custody.

He had hoped finally to start a new life with his two grown children and the woman he married while in prison. But he was transferred immediately to U.S. immigration custody under a retroactive 1996 law mandating the deportation of certain criminals. He has not seen his wife, a medical secretary living 300 miles away in Albany, N.Y., or their 7-year-old daughter since.

“That took a lot out of her, to find out her daddy’s not going to come home to be the daddy he hasn’t been,” Lillian Carrero said. “He just needs to be given a chance. If his time is done, he should be able to show society he’s sorry for what he’s done and to live a normal life.”

Cubans in deportation proceedings can have their detention reviewed annually by a two-person panel. The government said Mariels had been released about 9,000 times through this process since 1987 and in half of those cases had committed new crimes. But advocates say the process is flawed.

“There was a real lack of representation,” said Kerwin, of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network. “We’d find there wasn’t a 12-month review as required. Or if there was, there didn’t seem to be an actual release.”

The panel found on Nov. 21 that Rafael Macias Rivera, a detainee at York, should be released to a Bureau of Prisons halfway house as soon as one could be found. Almost year later – and 18 months after his incarceration on robbery and burglary charges ended – he is still in custody. A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the panel was looking into his detention.

“I don’t know why I’m still here,” Rivera said. “I did a lot of mistakes I regret. But right now, this is unjust. I paid for what I did to society, and they should let us go.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.